Even those of us who love hard data must acknowledge the truth that most people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. I have mentioned my belief that what matters most regarding employee retention and engagement is what employees talk about over dinner and bosses are often what they talk about over dinner.
Instead of wondering how to make employee retention goals and tools fit into your current corporate culture, consider making a fundamental change to your culture with the consistent belief, executive buy-in, and full organizational engagement in employee retention as one, if not the, most important focus of your organization.
The short answer is “no.” This discussion must start with our 9 million open jobs and a near-historically low 3.7% unemployment rate. And the pandemic-driven work-from-home trend is playing a major role.
Consider that top performers out-perform average performers by 4 to 1. But during these dog-chase-tail times, retaining even your average workers versus having to dip into the highly competitive recruiting pool makes more sense than continuously playing in the doom loop of recruit/train/do exit interviews and then start over.
“The things that destroy love and marriage often disguise themselves as unimportant. They’re not bombs and gunshots. They’re pinpricks. They’re paper cuts.” The common thinking about why employees quit is usually pay, benefits, career paths, and other broad one-size-fits-all expressions. The reality though is that many employees are quitting their jobs today because of the hundreds of paper cuts by their direct supervisors.
The first quarter of 2024 is a great time for visionary leaders to consider fresh strategies to retaining their organization’s top talent. With the unwavering belief that every company should make it a mission to cut turnover rates, I present to you five employee retention resolutions for your consideration.
29% of U.S. workers are quitting their jobs within one month of their first promotion. Yes, please read that sentence again. Given that we are talking about first promotions, maybe younger workers don’t see moving up the organization chart as worth the hassle, even for a jump in pay.
60 MINUTES did a deep dive into the pending commercial real estate crisis connected to work from home and the “stalled out” return-to-office movement. The wrong part of the report is that the pandemic is the root cause of this coming economic catastrophe. While the pandemic sparked it, the real cause is that today, CEOs cannot demand return-to-office because current workforce shortages give employees unprecedented power to say “no”.
Today is prime time for learning how to measure our applicants’ levels of grit…defined as passion and perseverance…because we are hiring so many of them. Assuming grit and engagement are workplace cousins, key words “finish”, “setbacks”, “diligent”, and “overcome” provide a good start to help structure the best interview questions to measure levels of grit in your applicants.
It seems too intangible or simple to say that supervisors who build trust will improve retention, even more than traditional solutions like pay, benefits, onboarding, training, and everything else. But it’s true that the the lens through which your people see their relationship with their manager is how they see your company.